The first years of Prince Charles's rule were overcast by the shadow thrown by that source of constant trouble in Eastern Europe, the Jewish Question, and by the pro-Semitic agitation in the Western Press. The bulk of the Jewish population of Roumania was settled in the Province of Moldavia, where it held mortgages on the greater part of the estates. In addition to this, as "universal providers" they almost monopolised the trade in spirits, whilst the bulk of the retail trade also lay in their hands. In times of famine and scarcity they were always ready to lend money at exorbitant rates to the heedless landowner and ignorant peasant, and thus acquired a hold over them which could not be shaken off. The bitter hatred with which the Moldavian population regarded their oppressors, and the violence caused by that feeling, were powerless to prevent the constant immigration of Jews from Poland and Southern Russia, where they experienced a far harder lot than that which awaited them in Roumania. That the anti-Semitic feeling was not wholly unjustifiable is shown by the opinion of M. Desjardins, who had ample opportunity of learning the rights and wrongs of the case. The French _savant_ declared that the Jews were not only aliens and strangers in Roumania by their language, religion, and customs, but that they actually desired to remain so. They refused to send their children to the Roumanian schools, though entitled to do so free of expense, and besides monopolising the whole retail trade of Moldavia, they exerted a most evil influence on the progress of the country by their usury. The peasant was forced to pay up to fifty per cent. _per mensem_ on loans, as there were no other means of raising money in times of scarcity. The Moldavian Jew was dirty and utterly neglected, and could not from any point of view be considered a desirable acquisition to the State. The Jews of Eastern Europe in general, and of Roumania in particular, have no intention, and, for the matter of that, no inclination to stoop to handicraft or manufacture. The quicker methods of getting money appeal to them more; and they are perfectly content to live on the needs and necessities of the original inhabitants of the land, though at the same time they bitterly resent the feeling with which they and their methods of money-making are regarded. The first outbursts of racial hatred during Prince Charles's reign proved too strong for the good intentions of the Government, nor was it to be expected that the Roumanian legislature would grant the alien race further rights or further liberty than Russia or even Austria felt inclined to do.